Why I’m crashing physically and mentally (and the 1 way I’ll recover)

I feel physically and mentally awful right now and I knew it was coming.

I think I hit my lowest point on the five-hour drive back from my son’s hockey tournament last weekend.

I was exhausted, looked and felt out of shape, and had a lot of important things I hadn’t done weighing on my mind.

Four weeks ago, I looked at my upcoming calendar with a little bit of dread.

Now don’t get me wrong — I enjoy nothing more than going to hockey tournaments. There is a very finite amount of time when I’ll get to enjoy this time with my boys.

My eldest is probably a couple of years away from aging out of minor organized sports, and with that, we’ll lose one of our most important bonding opportunities.

But when I fired up the ‘ol Google calendar a month ago and saw 4 tournaments over 3 weekends with 2 kids, I knew there would be a price to pay.

I haven’t been in the best place the last little while (Image licensed under the Unsplash+ License)

Feeling hypocritical

In the aftermath of three weeks of all-consuming kids’ sports, bad food choices, no exercise, bad hotel sleep, and a total lack of business productivity, I’m in need of a big reset.

My energy is low, my fitness has gone out the window, and my sense of self is rattled.

In a way, this makes me feel like a huge hypocrite.

I write a lot about living a healthy lifestyle (much of it in the context of quitting alcohol, which, if I were still drinking, would make everything 10x worse).

Prior to this run of tournaments, I was super jazzed about the ways I was going to rejig my diet.

I had recently written these two pieces about two of the fittest male celebs for their ages there are:

In those pieces, both men made it abundantly clear: when you reach a certain age, staying fit comes down to 80–90% diet.

So I followed up with two more about how I planned to adjust my diet accordingly:

And what did I eat this past weekend?

Well, I alternated between inadvertently starving myself during the day while we were super busy and compensating by eating absolute garbage the rest of the time: restaurant pizza, potato chips in the hotel room, and BBQ burgers out back.

So, on top of feeling physically washed, I also feel like I haven’t been living anything close to the lifestyle I extol in my writing.

But I also think it’s important to admit to our faults and use them as an opportunity to learn and build.

This is the point I’m at right now.

And I’m going to draw on one of the main strategies I used to quit alcohol in order to get my life back in order.

If you’re going to put the work into starting a positive routine, you may as well keep it going. Don’t break the chain. (Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash)

The power of routine

The reason I knew I was in trouble is that if I don’t have a routine, I don’t have anything.

My normal routines revolve around exercising every day (and typically adhering to a pretty strict workout), eating a steady, healthy diet, and working on my business every day to maintain momentum and consistency.

But travel and family obligations have a way of throwing a wrench in the works.

This isn’t a problem, in and of itself.

The problem is I was already anticipating going off the rails.

So rather than digging the roots of my routines deep enough so they would hold in a more demanding situation, I started getting lazier.

I would do this so often when I was trying to quit alcohol.

I’d say, “I want to quit, but I have this and this and this coming up, so maybe I’ll just drink every day until that’s over and then I’ll quit.”

Ultimately, it was figuring out that I desperately need routine that helped me finally ditch the booze for good and achieve my dream of building a highly profitable business on the side.

As an ADHD adult with an overactive, novelty-seeking brain, that the only way to keep myself on the rails was to replace bad behaviors with good ones and to do them every single day.

So, instead of drinking myself into a stupor every night, I needed to replace that with going to the gym late at night.

That routine became so embedded that it no longer became an option.

It was only when I started experimenting with going at all different times out of curiosity that I started going more infrequently and, lately, almost not at all.

I recently wrote about the musician Macklemore and how he fell off the wagon when COVID lockdowns destroyed his daily routines (as they did for all of us).

He said:

“It was an intense time. The life that I knew, just like all of our lives, was stripped away.

“I’m used to a certain schedule of touring, of being gone, of being home, of recovery and being able to go to a physical 12-step meeting.

“That stopped during COVID. Eventually, I’m on Instagram while being on Zoom and I’m just not really paying attention to the meetings.

“Eventually — and this is what happens when I don’t prioritize my recovery — if I don’t put that first, then I will lose everything that I’m putting in front of it. That’s what happens.”

Here’s what I wrote about my own experience at that time:

“Then, you guessed it, another complete lockdown removed my gym and kids’ sports routine again and, along with them, another alcohol-free period.

“With nothing to do but sit around at home, alcohol became the easy option again.

“This once-in-a-lifetime, black swan event really illustrated just how important activities and routines are to maintaining sobriety.

“Without access to the gym, activities, and to writing here, I honestly don’t know where I’d be.”

Reigniting the good routines

This applies to any behavior really, good or bad.

Although alcohol is no longer a problem in my life, I do need to get better at focusing my routines on the maintenance of good as opposed to the avoidance of bad.

I’m proud to say that, over the past 2 days, I’ve gotten myself back onto the primarily vegetarian diet I’m interested in trying.

I’ve done yoga twice and gone for a couple of long walks as I prep my body for a return to the gym.

I’ve sat my butt down and written two articles, including the one you’re reading right now.

In short, I’ve gotten back to the philosophy of one of my favorite self-help books of all time: picking up small wins every day until they compound into massive victories.

The reason it’s so important to solidify those routines now?

In 2 weeks, another run of 3 tournaments over two weekends begins.

The further you get away from doing things consistently, be it eating healthy, going to the gym, or writing every day, the harder it is to get started again.

This time, I won’t allow myself to make excuses as to why I can’t work out, get a proper night’s sleep, or eat a healthy diet.

I will have the merry-go-round at full momentum when the resistance of life kicks in.

If you’re struggling with anything right now, be it fighting addiction, getting to the gym, or anything else, take it from me: routine is your best friend.

Once you have it, don’t let it go. It’s the only thing that can deliver what you’re ultimately looking for.

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